Hey Robin, First think I thought of when I read your email was the step I had to go through to enable "raw" SATA access in ESXi.
http://cyborgworkshop.org/2011/01/08/enabling-raw-sata-access-in-esxi-free/ This could be handing for testing your theories since VMWare thinks it's dealing with a Virtual HD but it writing to a real disk you can disconnect and boot in another system like any other drive. Hope this helps. On 29 April 2013 11:09, Robin Wood <[email protected]> wrote: > I had this random thought last night that I don't have time to test out so > was wondering if anyone else knew the answer... > > When you create a disk in VirtualBox it lets you create it as a > dynamically growing one so that the file on host disk starts small but > grows as you write more data into it from the guest. If in the guest you > try to read areas of the disk which have not yet been created, for example > by using dd to clone the whole disk, what do you get from the areas which > haven't yet been created? > > I'd guess it would be either nulls or random stuff but just wondering. I > could lab it up but don't have time at the moment. > > What if you use direct disk write to write to the last sector? Does the > whole disk then get created on the host or does it do some smart > allocation? Or does it just crash? > > Does VMWare behave the same? Could checking this space be a way to try to > identify if you are in a VM? I know there are other, better, ways but the > more options you have the better. > > Robin > > _______________________________________________ > Pauldotcom mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.pauldotcom.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pauldotcom > Main Web Site: http://pauldotcom.com > -- BaconZombie LOAD "*",8,1
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